Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Friday September 29, 2006 @06:12AM
from the oh-all-right dept.

davidwr writes "Paypal settled a suit with Maryland and 27 states. Among other things, they'll conspicuously advertise a contact phone number and staff it 14 hours a day and be much more forthcoming about when they will debit your bank account. For those of you who think Paypal Sucks, well, starting soon it sucks just a little less."

Hell no! PayPal has gotten worse and worse since it's been trying to be more like a bank. I'm constantly being annoyed with calls 'Did you make this purchase - it doesn't fit your profile.' and constantly having to dig up information to prove my account is being accessed by myself and not someone else. This is freaking annoying. I move $120,000+/yr through my account and I'm not stupid enough to lose my card or use a weak password. Leave me the hell alone with your stupid consumer protection schemes. I don'

"For those of you who think Paypal Sucks, well, starting soon it sucks just a little less."

Do people really think that when a corporation gets ordered by a court to behave in a different way, that the organisation will really change? At best, the screwing over and offensive behaviour will become more subtle, or "accepted" (by their customers) screwings from other finance houses will be done by PP but "enhanced". Shit like them taking x days to transfer money about, for example.

So you trust some unknown person with your banking information, but not a company. Do you realized that everytime you give out that information you are risking being taken for all that you have in the bank. One of the Nigerian scams involves getting you banking information and then poof you account is dry. Getting the money back is next to impossible.If you would like you can give me your banking information and for the small fee of $1 I will send you detailed information on why what you are doing is dan

If I pay someone on ebay by a bank transfer, they give me their details, not the other way round (so my privacy is actually maintained, of course they get an address to post the goods to). I don't use ebay much, but from my recent use it appears that a reasonable amount of (power?) sellers openly publish their bank details for payers' convienience. To transfer money I need the accounts name, sort code and account number, and with that info I can only put money into the account, not remove any. The ebay sell

Direct debit - here in Britain - is subject to vigorous protection. It requires you to give permission to your bank, and if you contest any of the charges then your branch is obliged to immediately refund them. To use it to steal money you would have to find someone absolutely acalculic.

I've been using my girlfriends bank details for online direct debits for ages (sometime they even put through my name on the direct debit request) , we've never had to sign anything and the money comes out every month.

I do have her permission to setup direct debits but the bank doesn't know that and still lets me set them up, accasionally using my name instead of hers.

All you have to do to setup a scam is setup a company and begin taking Direct debits over the internet.

OK, so it follows that the fewer places my bank details are, the less likely a direct debit could be set up to hoover my account. So by not using Paypal, by not even having an account (anymore), I cannot be phished, nor can PP be cracked (tech or social) and my details getting out.

Though my bank details may be visible to other ebay users I buy from, and by extension their accounts could be hacked and my details obtained by a crook, but this is pretty unlikely. But by the sounds of it the DD scheme is ve

The 419 scam is usually more work for them than that. The scam usually runs like "Hey, I have all this money, and I'll give you some if you front me the money to get it out of the country". All they steal is the money you send, though frequently they get even more when they ask for money for "additional unexpected circumstances". Once they've found somebody sufficiently greedy or gullible, they milk them, not the account.

Occasionally it's been known to turn to kidnaping and ransom when people visit Nigeria to try to get their money back or even follow an invitation to "help".

It's also called "Advance Fee Fraud". I still don't know why it's the Nigerians who make it so famous, since the scam has been played for centuries, even without bank transfers. They just seem to have turned it into a national industry.

I think what made Nigeria famous was the reams of spam comming out of the country using the scam, and the fact that "419 scam" is catchy. As for the spam, the country's dirt poor, and got a huge influx of free computers and infrastructure from charities in the 90's (the optimist in me calls those charities dumb, they cynic thinks they were developing the next India).

The scam was run via snail-mail before the Internet. It's Nigerian because it originally involved the cooperation of officials of the Nigerian central bank. It's 419 because that number is in some way associated with the Nigerian law the scammers are violating.

You can't empty someone's bank account just with their account number. The nigerian scam involves them asking you to send them money on various pretexes. Giving them your bank account number has nothing to do with it.

From TFA:"Under terms of the settlement agreement, PayPal said it is not admitting any liability for the allegations in the dispute."From the actual court transcript: "Your Honor, my client PayPal is sorry, but not sorry for what the plaintiffs thought we should be sorry for. I mean sorry in a general yet noble way. My client will keep doing what they were doing but with a much more cautious unscrupulousness.

At the same time, Your Honor, PayPal recognizes that people were genuinely angry and my client is si

- locking out accounts for 'attempted signing in from another country' - yeah, without even getting a correct password- only use a password to secure accounts- only provide a national rate number in the UK, although you can get them on 0800 358 7929 for free- expect you to send absolutely everything by fax yet they won't talk to you except by email- not allow you to speak to anyone in the dispute or resolution centre, leaving you arguing with sales staff who don't have a clue- make it impossible to close your account if it is locked, even after providing all the information you can and no money left in there

I'm disgusting with Paypal and going through the process of deleting my account. It's not easy, but I'll keep trying. Paypal will always suck in the UK it seems...:(

To be fair, that's often the case with any large organisation. While it certainly shouldn't be the response that a customer gets, internally that'll almost certainly be exactly how things are set up. Certainly it is where I work, and my company was bought by its current owners about 5 years ago.

My favourite - sending you an email, dated "day 1". Saying that for whatever reason, they'll action a direct debit on your account in "5 working days, so please ensure sufficient funds". The very next day, you get a call from your bank manager. "A direct debit from PayPal has been dishonoured and you've been charged a fee". Wow, that 5 working days went fast. And of course PayPal bills you for the dishonour fee. And when you ask why, when you eventually get an answer, "Well, we could bill it at any time. We send that email as a courtesy. We chose to do so before then, as is our right."

While IANAL it would seem that that statement does not in any way indicate they will debit it sooner than 5 days and as such you might have legal action against them for the resulting additional fees it caused from them doing it sooner.

Tell me something.. how the hell do you delete a paypal account? I've had one for a while and not used it. So where the hell are the interface options for killing the account? I don't feel comfortable having an idle paypal account linked to my bank account. It's asking for trouble. But I can't find any clear method in their user interface for deleting your account, or requesting to have it removed. Their UI is so horrible.. it's just awful.

Except they still keep the bank account info. I deleted an account from my PayPal account, then for some reason (stupid me) tried to use it on a different account I set up later. So I registered the account and then wham I couldn't use that debt-card because it was tied to the old account.

I went into the old account and apparently someone had complained that the printer I sold on ebay and advertised as "broken, parts only, as-is" didn't work upon recipt. So they charged me back the $20. So now, 4 years later, I have a PayPal account with a -120 balance, an "open collections" account on my credit history, and will never ever EVER use PayPal again.

The worst part is, even after I deleted that checking account, they tried to withdraw the 20 dollars for the charge-back from it. They tried four times! I was broke at the time, didn't even have 20 dollars in the account, so I got charged 25 dollar "insufficent funds" from them also. They can rot for all I care I will not pay that. I would have paid the $20 originally because it was my mistake for using eBay... but I will not pay the additonal fees. I filed a complaint against PayPal at my bank, and they told me that "they hear that a lot about them" and that they've blocked PayPal from ever touching my account...

I'm disgusting with Paypal and going through the process of deleting my account. It's not easy, but I'll keep trying. Paypal will always suck in the UK it seems...

They will continue to suck, but you don't have to let them get away with it over here. Unlike in the US, the UK holds Paypal responsible for nonsense like this. Screw their "customer support" lines, go directly to the Financial Ombudsman [financial-...man.org.uk] - Paypal is permitted 8 weeks from the time you initially state your complaint, and then the Ombudsman can take over. This is a tax-funded service that is free to you as a consumer; Paypal is obliged to cooperate with them as a condition of doing business in the UK at all. Any decision made by the Ombudsman is binding on Paypal in the same manner as a court judgement would be.

Having taken care of that, feel free to report the whole affair to the Financial Services Authority [fsa.gov.uk]. Where the Ombudsman takes care of your case, the FSA shakes the company by the neck until they stop creating more cases. This one in particular:

not allow you to speak to anyone in the dispute or resolution centre, leaving you arguing with sales staff who don't have a clue

is an offence that already carries a hefty fine if proven. A company regulated by the FSA is not allowed to create barriers like this; they are required to have a clear and efficient complaints procedure and follow it precisely.

Lastly, the Office of Fair Trading [oft.gov.uk] can also weigh in when any company doing business in the UK fails to handle complaints in a reasonable manner or generally tramples on their customers for profit, in the unlikely event that the FSA is not interested.

Yes, that is horrible. In fact, you should petition the UN Human Rights Council about this atrocity. Get one of the council member states to back your case. Maybe Syria could, since they have such a spectacular history of protecting human rights.Though you might have to wait for the UN to act on things like the genocide in Darfur, religious intolerance and persecution in Saudi Arabia, political prisoners in Cuba and Venezuela, and other human rights problems around the world, before they get to yours. I kno

Does it mean that PayPal will stop blocking accounts (and the money in them) for peregrine reasons like, in my case, your name sounding similar to Al Qaeda's terrorists? And I'm not even in the same continent nor religion as them!

Your name sounds like an Al Q`aida member? To the spooks who grew up in America speaking English? With their idea of what an Arabic names sounds like, given a string of English alphabet characters with random quotes and back quotes thrown in, and without a "u" following the "q"? Then you must be an enemy combatant. Get ready to ship out to Camp X-Ray at the gitmo, pal.

BTW, it is so easy to change your name in that part of the world, middle-east south Asia. Why dont you get new documents with a different

This is modded Funny, but he's absolutely serious. Paypal can and will block your account and SEIZE all of the money in it for any reason whatsoever. Not liking your name is a new one for me, but I've seen plenty of hardship on the web. Newzbin.com, a usenet indexing site, regularly lost thousands of dollars at a time to this practice. They would petition and be re-instated, but lose all their money. It was their main payment method, and most of their customers preferred it, so they kept dealing with it... Until it happened like 3 times in 3 months. They finally called it quits and use other payment methods now.

Paypal DOES suck. And they SHOULD be regulated like a bank. I suspect their business model might have issues if they do, though.

I'm wondering why some bank doesn't step in and offer a viable PayPal competitor? They have the knowledge and the resources to create one, and they have the funds to provide the safety nets and bank-required measures that an only PayPal-type service should be force to have. What barriers are in the way of this?

What do you think it means when the Government says their "freezing the assets of the terrorists"?

The worst part is that unless you can prove to both Paypal and Homeland Security that you're not who they think you are, you're up a creek, and neither Paypal nor Homeland Security are any fun to deal with.

I sold some information (nothing exotic). It was only $125 and i delivered my end. -a clean deal. A few months go by and i log into my account and see -125
So i say, "WTF why do i have a chargeback & why was i not contacted seeing how you have all my personal info" (acurate info)

They say i did not suppy tracking information when asked. I had 3 days to send this info before my account was jacked by some little twerp. (zabasearch gave me his home address) I did not check this email because it is only used for paypal, & with no business going on.. why check it?

So not only did i loose the data i sold,.. but i ended up paying somebody to take it for me.
So if you sell something as a "service" how are you to provide a tracking number? Any graphic or website payment can be charged back
-another loophole & it seems that paypal does not give a shat about the person who has been using the service from the beginning.

they made an attempt to contact me sure.. buTT. paypal has 2 email addys on file, and my cell number + home number. In a chargeback case they should take the time to call the person about to get jacked. -like a normal bank or respectable business.
I have not had any quams untill now with PP.. but that was before i lost money.

I believe your agreement specifies that disputes are to be handled in the court of their locality, so they can just file a small claims case, you wont show up, they win by default. Relatively inexpensive for them to handle.

The same thing can happen to you if you have a credit card merchant account (we do) and you can not prove the delivery of goods or services. This is not unique to PayPal. However, the banks do send you written notice and give you more than three days - so I agree, that does suck.

First of all, this is a royal pain in the ass, but there are ways to make it work:

Have a server that contains your files, with a validation code or password protected directory. Send the validation code by mail. Being that I've seen people listing $5.00 shipping for web-only or non-tangible items, it should be pretty to list a $2.00 postage fee or whatever it is to send the thing by registered make.

Again, it's a pain in the ass, but it's a good method of verification.

"We hope this agreement with an industry leader will set standard best practices for Internet businesses across the country to follow," said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott... PayPal must also establish a conspicuous "Contact Us" link on its Web pages and provide a toll-free customer support number that operates at least 14 hours daily, according to the attorney general's office. - Star-Telegram Austin [dfw.com]

Standard best practices??? 14x7 and a toll-free number that probably only works within the continental USA? Welcome to 1950.

But to all those people using PayPal what do you really expect?
Here you have a company that is acting very much like a bank. It allows you to hold a balance. It allows you to perform wire transfers. It allows you to debit and credit your accounts.
The difference is, that it's not a bank. It's not mandated by the same rules that the government has imposed on banks. Hence, you're gonna get screwed. Why? There's not rules and regulations to stop them from breaking laws that in any other financial ins

But to all those people using PayPal what do you really expect? [...] There's not rules and regulations to stop them from breaking laws that in any other financial institution are... well... laws.

I expect Paypal (and any other company that functions like them, offering bank-like services) to not only attempt to make money but also give its customers a sense of security when using their services. A company in that line of business based in the U.S. is only going to go so far before the government does someth

First of all, PayPal does not act "like a bank" in all respects. Last I checked, it wasn't possible to get any type of business or even personal loan from them. That's a *huge* function of a "bank". They also don't seem to offer any types of "savings accounts"... merely a variation of a "checking account with interest" that foregoes usage of paper checks.I'm not so sure that people would like the results if they got what they clamor for when they beg govt. to regular PayPal as though they're just anothe

I'm not disagreeing that PayPal is far different from a bank as it doesn't allow Loans, Savings Accounts, etc. The thing is, that it still does provide the basics. It charges interest. It withholds money. It can hold money just like a chequing account. They can also transfer to and from PayPal accounts.The problem I'm saying is that it's very much a "wild west" situation with PayPal right now. Although one can risk them not taking advantage of you and your money one can't guarantee that it's not going

It is run and sponsored by the competition. The webmaster tries to deny that saying he's just advertising alternatives, but the alternatives advertised on paypalsucks.com are FAR WORSE and just fronts for laundering and identity theft.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as "proof", but if you just look at the web site, it immediately presents links to another merchant processor at 995MerchantAccounts [995merchantaccounts.com]. I tried to WHOIS both paypalsucks.com and this other site and found they both don't identify the people or organizations behind them in their register.com info. PayPalSucks uses a WhoIs Privacy Protection, Inc. registrant identity, and 995MerchantAccounts identifies their admin as Administrator.

I've never had a problem with PayPal, but I admit I don't really use them as a merchant processor. I just use them for the occasional payment. However, their pricing seems pretty good, regardless of whether it's the best. In addition, I recall having one problem with a purchase several years ago (before eBay bought them), and I got a full refund. (The merchant didn't deliver.)

How is PayPal evil but not the competitor that's posing as some kind of consumer activist site?

I was disputing the "evidence" that paypalsucks.com is run by a competitor. I don't know if it is or not, but "anonymous" domain registrations are extremely common, and 995merchantaccounts.com looks like just like a standard commercial merchant account. Identification of your contact as "Administrator" is common in that typically in a large organization, a role is responsible for the domain rather than a person. So, the Administrator is responsible rather than George in IT.Paypal is evil in that they act

Didn't PayPal (supposedly) increase their customer service efforts a year or so ago? There's an old story which needs to be dug up.The mode of the customer service isn't the problem, it's the quality. Even if there are live operators, that won't make any difference if they keep locking accounts for no apparent reason, or for reasons the customer isn't at fault for, or if the operators can't take reasonable action without customer acrobatics. The attitude and practices at PayPal are what need to be changed.

For what it's worth, I have been using PayPal since the beginning and I've never had a problem. My PayPal money market account has a higher rate that any "normal" bank, and is much more convenient for online stuff. I use it to accept online payment and recommend it to all my web design clients.
I feel for the users who had their accounts locked, but there's a balance between security, ease-of-use, and low costs, and personally, I'll take a little inconvenience for a higher interest rate and lower transact

For what it's worth, I suspect about 75% of the horror stories about paypal are complete fabrications. I hear about all of these people online who supposedly lost thousands of dollars through Paypal, but I've never met anyone in person who has had much trouble with them at all. A lot of the horror stories have somewhat fishy details too, like why the other side wasn't saying anything and how they were able to just casually close their Paypal account. It doesn't help that websites that make a big deal a

Like many of you we all had issues with Paypal. My story is a bit different in the fact that I was part of every bit of this lawsuit.
When i was in college I sold things through ebay and I made a good bit of money doing it. One time I had a particularly large order ($3500) and like each of my orders I require that the mailto address AND phone number matched the paypal information. I would call the number, speak with that person and then begin the order. I would also get confirmation on shipping, tracking a

That's fine and all, except it's false. In your so-called "land of the free", private institutions are NOT allowed to refuse to do business with anyone they please. There's a whole slew of anti-discrimination laws that deal with that. I would guess it is forbidden to discriminate against someone for their political beliefs.
Besides, I though your party found Jews bashing to be cool, nowadays.

No, you *can* refuse to do business with anyone you please. You just *can't* do it because they're part of a particular group, i.e. female, over 50, white, christian etc. Refusing to do business because they're being rude to your staff is fine be they black, white or tie-dye pink.

I think an issue here is *who* should be bashing the bigot. If corporations do this on our behalf then we (or our community) lose the capacity to fight bigotry. It's up to us, not faceless corporations, to challege these people. And it is through the process of open discussion that we come to understand what is right - lest we end up in some Orwellian void where PayPal et al do all the thinking for us.

I thought a company still had a right to determine who their clients were as long as it wasn't based on race. If a company wants to ban a group because they promote hate, isn't that their right. Imagine is a Jewish guy owned Paypal and had to put up with people selling Holocaust lamp shades and wallets. Should he have to take that kind of crap?

Sure Malcom X was a racist. He hated white people. Look where he grew up and the time period. I'm not saying racism is good, but I can

what a crock.Someone does not have to be jewish, black, injun or purple to understand and hate oppression and those that support it.

The SAME right those people utilize to talk their 'crap' (whether it be black power, white power or "kill the white people" by tyrone green and his reggae band) is the right that PAYPAL utilizes to NOT DEAL WITH THEM.

If some skinhead with a swastika on his shirt walks into my shop cussing up "this that or the other", I'm going to send him right out again. I don't care if he's

Up until 2 weeks ago, I would have said the same thing. I've used Paypal for about 4 years, bought/sold hundreds of items on eBay, paying exclusively through Paypal. I even had the debit card, which I used to take advantage of their cash-back for Visa purchases.

In July, I sold an item on eBay, got paid for it, life went on. Second week of September, I get an email from Paypal saying that they had reason to believe this item was paid for with fraudulent funds, and asked me to provide tracking info, etc., for the item sold. I did, gave them everything they asked for.

Two weeks later, I get another email from them, stating:"We have conducted a review of a payment that you received. In this case, returning the funds to the sender was determined to be the appropriate action, and we have completed a reversal of the payment. Good selling practices, like trackable shipping, prompt shipment, and communication between buyer and seller help prevent disputes."

Huh? I provided them with a tracking number, delivery was confirmed, item was shipped the same day payment was received. I contacted the buyer (this person has purchased multiple items from me, I have no reason to not trust them), asked them if they knew anything more than I did. They have not received any refund from Paypal, and in fact didn't even know there was a problem.

So, who was my money "returned" to? Repeated emails to Paypal have been ignored, so I've closed my account, I'll never use Paypal again.

No point. For the $30 that they stole from me, it's not worth my time to spend an hour or more talking to some drone who can't help me anyway. Getting that money back wouldn't change the fact that they decided to stomp on a long-time customer with no explanation whatsoever. I understand fraud happens and disputes come up, but they asked me for specific pieces of information, information which I freely provided to them. The delivery of the merchandise was confirmed, the buyer says he is satisfied and did

Perhaps, and a lot of companies love an arguement like that. It's not worth your time to fight over $30, but when 500 people find it not worth their time then that comes to:
$30
x 500
=
$15,000 (profit)

I'm fairly sure that phone companies use a similar tactic. Locally, Bell is one of the worst. My previous co-worker, with astounding dedication, would usually end up donating about two lunch-hours a day on the phone fixing his bill. He would go over it monthly, and discovered that (during about a 7 month p